All hell has broken loose in the Upper West Side as the two keystone coalitions of the new Democratic Party engage in an intersectional catfight. Following a brawl between a group of black tourists from Texas and restaurant staff attempting to enforce New York City’s mandatory proof of vaccination policy, Black Lives Matter activists initiated a protest against the offending restaurant, Carmine’s.
What really happened remains in dispute. Although the three women charged with inciting the spat alleged that the waitstaff in question used racial slurs and accused the black would-be patrons of providing fabricated vaccination cards, Carmine’s released a video indicating that the tourists were indeed the aggressors. That hasn’t stopped BLM from making the most of the moment.
“Seventy-two percent of black people in this city from ages 18 to 44 are unvaccinated,” said BLM NYC co-founder Chivona Newsome about the fracas. “So what is going to stop the Gestapo, I mean the NYPD, from rounding up black people, from snatching them off the train, off the bus?”
Equating the protest with those mobilized after the murder of George Floyd last year, Newsome added that BLM NYC was putting the city “on notice.”
“Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising,” Newsome said. “And that is not a threat; that is a promise. The vaccination passport is not a free passport to racism.”
The protest, however unfounded in the facts, forces the Left to confront an uncomfortable and untenable conflict in its post-pandemic coalition, namely that black Americans, the backbone of the Democratic Party, are the racial demographic least likely to get vaccinated.
Compared to a razor-thin majority of all whites who have been vaccinated (this denominator includes the children younger than 12 who are not yet eligible for the vaccine), only 43% of blacks have been vaccinated, as Newsome notes, a figure even smaller in New York City. It thus comes as little surprise that black New Yorkers would balk at the city mandate. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, who recently announced his own mandate that all 80 million private-sector workers at companies with more than 100 employees provide proof of vaccination or negative weekly COVID tests, the Carmine’s dustup was only a preview of what’s to come.
According to Morning Consult, Biden’s job approval with black voters fell by 12 points after that announcement. That includes a six-point drop among vaccinated black voters and a 17-point drop among unvaccinated voters.
Biden won his party’s nomination and the presidency because of black voters, and Hillary Clinton almost surely lost the 2016 election because black voter turnout cratered in 2016, even as white and Asian-American turnout increased. Especially without Donald Trump on the ballot, Democrats simply cannot afford to lose their supermajority of support from black voters.
So who will Biden choose: the corona Karens or the historical bulwark of his entire constituency? Because so long as Democrats insist on using sticks instead of the numerous carrots he hasn’t yet tried to drive up vaccination rates, the two demographics will become increasingly mutually exclusive.
